🚀 go-pugleaf

References:


Summary: A short story of my tragedy and partial recovery.  Then
questions about how Word 3.0 stores things, and why.  And listing of 2
other problems, while I am at it.  For Word Gurus, plus the curious.

So, I go ahead and use Word 3.0 to do the book.  Glutton for
punishment me, but I am addicted to the features.  So there I am, four
hours since the last incremental hard-disk dump, writing the chapter
on system failures when:
	A routine back-up save to the hard disk hangs up.  66% written
and nothing is happening.  The 66% figure stays there, the clockface cursor
sits there, but no disk noises. j-clock keeps running.  20 minutes
later it is still there. So I take a few more deep breaths and reboot.
	[interactions?  j-clock.  Superspool Imagewriter spooler.
	Standard Mac +.  DataFrame 20 Mbyte hard disk. Nothing else
	that should cause problems.] 
	
My file is there, 59K long, but when I load it, Word tells me it has
only 839 characters and, worse, what is in it is my "todo" notes which
are supposed to be in a different file, in a different subdirectory.

There is a Word Temp 44 file some 77K long.  Word can't load it.

I poke around the files with Mactools and can't make any sense of
what is there. Lots of text in both the trashed text file and the temp
file, but it seems to be randomly taken from stuff written over the
past 6 months.  Stray stuff on the disk, one would think.

In desperation, I change the TYPE and CREATOR on the Word Temp file to
be WDBN and MSWD and just try loading the temp file into Word 3.  It
works! I only lose 2 hours of stuff (I back up every few minutes --
why did I lose 2 hours?)

----
QUESTIONS and OTHER PROBLEMS

What is the purpose of the temp file?  Why is it a backup?  If it
really is a backup, why doesn't MS word provide a recovery process for
it.  Anybody ever recover lost stuff before?  Why can't I piece
together the text in the trashed main file: why is it 59K long, with
only 839 bytes of recoverable stuff -- the wrong stuff.

The Table of Contents suddenly stopped working a week ago.  That is,
it works fine on short files, bombs, consistently on long files.  It
used to be an essential feature.  Now it is useless.  It seemed to
bomb on the second pass, after pagination, during the collection of
terms, and only when it got to the very last page of the manuscript.

So, I try a GOTO page 99 (a non-existent page): bomb.  Consistently.
Now what.  Anyone else have this problem?

And every so often Word reverts to innocence.  I boot the system and
Word displays short menus.  No specially tailored menus.  No memory of
all my styles.  The Word Settings File is clobbered.  Why?  No clues.  An
incremental restore of the file saves thing.  I have learned to keep a
copy hanging around. (I am far from Word's limits: I only use aboput 6
special styles, plus redefining normal, the TOC styles, and the
outline (level) styles.  

Why is the Microsoft hotline closed on weekend and holidays when
everyone knows that is when all crashes occur? :-(

Yes, once you get used to it, Word has a lot of things needed for a
professional editor.  If it would only be reliable.

don norman


Donald A. Norman
Institute for Cognitive Science C-015
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California 92093
norman@nprdc.arpa    	{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!sdcsvax!ics!norman
norman@sdics.ucsd.edu	norman%sdics.ucsd.edu@RELAY.CS.NET